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Abstract

We have designed, built, and characterized a high-resolution objective
lens that is compatible with an ultrahigh vacuum environment. The lens
system exploits the principle of the Weierstrass sphere solid
immersion lens to reach a numerical aperture (NA) of 0.92. Tailored to
the requirements of optical lattice experiments, the objective lens
features a relatively long working distance of 150 μm. Our two-lens
design is remarkably insensitive to mechanical tolerances in spite of
the large NA. Additionally, we demonstrate the application of a
tapered optical fiber tip, as used in scanning near-field optical
microscopy, to measure the point spread function (PSF) of a high NA
optical system. From the PSF, we infer the wavefront aberration for
the entire field of view of about 75 μm. Pushing the NA of an optical
system to its ultimate limit enables novel applications in quantum
technologies such as quantum control of atoms in optical microtraps
with an unprecedented spatial resolution and photon collection
efficiency.

Figures (3)

Fig. 1. (a) Cutaway drawing of the objective lens: (1) Weierstrass-like lens (Ø=20mm), (2) aspheric lens (Ø=25mm), and (3) ceramic holder. For illustrative purposes,
the atoms in the optical lattice in front of the objective lens are
shown not to scale. (b) Fluorescence image acquired with our high NA
objective lens, showing two cesium atoms trapped in adjacent lattice
sites of a two-dimensional optical lattice. The positions of the
optical lattice sites are indicated by the white dots, whereas the
black dots correspond to the reconstructed positions of the two
atoms.

Fig. 2. (a) Optical setup employed to measure the PSF. The circularly polarized
light emitted from the SNOM fiber tip is collimated through the high
NA objective lens and focused onto a beam-profiling CCD camera using a
tube lens. (b) Two-dimensional PSF recorded with the beam profile
CCD-camera. (c) Azimuthally integrated PSF for measured data (solid
blue line), a fitted model based on a wavefront expansion in Zernike
polynomials (dashed red line), and the same as the latter but with the
defocus aberration set to zero (solid red line). The inset attests the
quality of the fitted model in a logarithmic scale.

Fig. 3. (a) Measured values (blue dots) and theoretical prediction based on the
objective lens design (red line) as a function of the transversally
displaced point-like emitter. The region between the vertical dashed
lines represents the expected field of view (±38μm) of the objective lens in which the design Strehl
ratio is above 0.8. (b)–(d) Example images of the corresponding
intensity distributions at different positions of the field of
view.